Quote Originally Posted by leo9 View Post
People living for long periods in deep caves, intentionally not using clocks, still live by regular routines from the passage of time that they feel in themselves.
Humans have evolved within a 24 hour diurnal world, and our bodies' clocks retain that timing. However, without outside references, this timing can be changed, stretched to longer periods, or compressed to shorter periods. While they may perform regular routines, without any kind of objective reference there's no way for them to perform them at regular intervals.

Time as a linear scale is objective, but the passage of time is completely subjective, a shared hallucination of thinking beings.
I think that the passage of time is less an hallucination and more of a memory. Having had a couple of surgeries, with anesthetic, I experienced no sense of the passage of time until I began to wake up. And even then there were gaps until I was fully awake. The same happens when we sleep. If you wake up during the night, without looking at a clock or some other means of measuring the passage of time, you cannot know how long you've really slept. One hour or four, or only a few minutes?

One of the things I mention when atheists argue that subjective experiences like spirituality can't have any serious importance...
Not sure I understand this reference. Subjective experiences of any type can have tremendous importance to the person having them. But without some kind of objective evidence there's no way to tell if they were real or simply a false memory.

however the general entropy level rises, a black hole remains a reservoir of negative entropy.
According to Hawking, though, black holes do NOT remain. They eventually evaporate. I don't claim to understand the physics, but there is one thing that does escape a black hole: gravity.

In my book on the afterlife, I suggested that the spirit plane - being, according to all the world's mythologies, the place where patterns of order go when they are lost to the material world - balances the material plane's increasing entropy by accumulating order and decreasing entropy. I haven't followed that thought through, but it seems to have possibilities.
Maybe, if you had any objective evidence for the existence of this spirit plane. But we already know that energy cannot be lost to the material world. It can be changed and dispersed, but not lost.